She had closed her eyes. Had she fallen asleep?
He first mouthed, then whispered the words: ‘I understand.’
Her eyes flashed open. The look she gave him was pure gratitude.
He put his mother to bed, then located the room in which he was to sleep. There was a Finding Nemo mobile hanging from the ceiling, there were posters of Port Adelaide footballers on the wall. He stripped off and slid into the single bed. For a long time he lay there, his ears straining, trying to decipher the sounds of the unfamiliar house. There was a low rumble of traffic somewhere beyond the suburb, the scratching of branches against windows and beams. The house didn’t breathe, it didn’t welcome him — it evaded him. He switched on the bedside light, a toy model of Hogwarts, and grabbed the Graham Greene from his backpack. The first light was peeking through the slats of the blinds when he finished the novel, the first light touched his face as he fell asleep.
Spiro drove them to the hospital. Dan sat in the front passenger seat, the window slightly lowered. The air was crisp; the colours of Adelaide were the cyan of the clear sky, the steely bark on the eucalyptus trees, the weathered sandstone of the buildings. He had no memory of the city, yet the suburbs all seemed familiar, as did the roads, the parks, the office buildings, they all reminded him of the estates and neighbourhoods and malls of Melbourne. Maybe all cities were kin, he mused, maybe all cities shared the same DNA.
They parked and Spiro led them through reception, to the lifts and up to the second floor where they walked past a common room, the blinds raised to let in the sunlight. In the room there sat a circle of old people, a few of them in wheelchairs, a few slumped over in their seats. Past the nurses’ station, they walked through an empty dining room in which a small radio innocuously bleated out olden days cheap disco music. They turned down a corridor and Joanna knocked on the door numbered eighteen.
‘Yes?’ It was Bettina’s voice, gravelly, commanding.
Spiro opened the door and the family filed in. Dan and his mother were the last to enter, his hand on her shoulder.
Bettina was sitting by the head of the old woman’s bed; she didn’t acknowledge any of them, not even her daughter. His giagia was lying there, her mouth and eyes open in her skull-like head, but her eyes were unseeing — she was close to being a corpse. It nauseated him to look at her.
Two men in the room were introduced to him as his uncles; their wives were visiting as well. They were his mother’s brothers, his mother’s sisters-in-law, but they would not look at her. They nodded to Dan, said hello, but he made no attempt to be friendly. He shook the men’s hands because he knew that to do otherwise would have distressed his mother, but he held each hand limply, as they did his.
Dennis was sitting in a chair in the opposite corner, still wearing his AC/DC t-shirt, his head down as he picked at the fabric on the chair’s arm. Dan moved closer to his cousin, noticing the thick brush of hair covering the back of his neck, so dense it was like a coat of fur, disappearing into the t-shirt.
As if they were an audience at a play awaiting the opening scene, everyone had formed a half-circle around the end of the bed. His mother took a place on the opposite side of the bed to her unsmiling sister. She bent down and kissed the old woman’s sunken cheek. ‘Hi, Mum, how are you?’
The old woman stared blankly. A catheter was in the raised blue vein above her wrist, clear fluid dripping into her from the bag above the bed.
‘She doesn’t know who you are.’
Dan’s mother ignored Bettina and spoke quietly in Greek to the old woman, who didn’t show even a flicker of recognition. ‘Come here, Danny,’ said his mother, beckoning, ‘come and say hello to your giagia.’
There was a slow steady clicking from the heater; the room was overheated and smelled overpoweringly of antiseptic. He walked over to the bed and stood beside his mother.
‘Mamá, this is Danny. This is your grandson.’
Now that he was looking down at her, Dan could see that the old woman’s eyes were glazed over, a murky film of silver veiling each pupil. Her breathing was erratic, terribly shallow. He couldn’t believe how delicate her skin was, as if it were made of the flimsiest tissue; it looked as though it would tear at the slightest touch. The old woman’s hair had fallen away, she had no eyebrows. There was no muscle on her, no flesh; just the insubstantial skin and the contours of the bones beneath. He was acutely aware of both the lightness of her body and the dead weight of the fear in the room. His mother was sobbing. Dan looked down at the extinguishing life and felt perhaps a little pity, nothing more.
Bettina’s gruff voice said something in Greek. Then she shrugged and looked across at Dan. ‘Don’t be offended. She doesn’t recognise any of us anymore.’
‘I’m not offended.’ It made him feel more warmly towards his aunt, even though she’d been horrible to his mother, despite her lack of forgiveness. They must have thought that he was part of them, must have even wanted him to be part of who they were. But surrounded by his cousins and aunts and uncles, standing by his grandmother’s bed, he knew he would never be part of what they were. He thought of his granddad’s musical Glasgow accent, his nan’s fierce, protective love. He was them: they were alive, they were flesh and muscle and blood, they were real memory and history. They were love. He felt as much for this old Greek woman as he did for the sad circle of old people in the common room: useless pity, nothing more.
Dennis got out of his chair and Bettina snapped her head around. ‘Where are you going?’
Dan could just make out the word, the three syllables of cigarette extended and twisted into one tortuous moan.
‘Make sure you come straight back here,’ Bettina said. ‘You know how to get back here? Room eighteen?’
Dennis seemed to be looking past all of them to something high on the wall above Dan’s head, invisible to everyone else but obvious and fascinating to him.
Dan saw his opportunity to flee. He nodded over to his cousin. ‘Hey, mate, I’ll come out with you.’
‘Sm-smoke?’
Dan had left his jacket behind in the room, and the wind was brisk, glacial, but he didn’t care. It felt so good to be outside, away from the artificial heat of the hospital room, the disapproving strangers.
His cousin was a full foot taller than he was, and was all muscle, thick-necked and broad-backed. Dennis didn’t seem to feel the cold as the rising wind whipped around them, though Dan could see a spray of goose pimples on his forearm. Dennis spoke again.
‘Pardon? Could you say that again, please?’ Dan asked.
It was the longest sentence he had yet heard Dennis utter but he had understood none of it. Dennis finished his cigarette and put the butt out under the sole of his sneaker. He still seemed to be looking at something invisible playing out above Dan’s head.
‘Sho, sho. Yar. Ma Ma Ma. Cuz. Een?’
’ So you’re my cousin? ‘Yeah, that’s right.’
‘And and yar yar fru fru frumma Mel Mel Mel. Burn?’
’ Dan wanted to finish the sentence for him. He had to stop himself. ‘Yeah, you ever been there?’
For the first time, his cousin looked at him. The man’s eyes were limpid and deep-set, the grey of wet granite; his nose had been broken in the past and there was a small scar on his left temple that disappeared into the dark wave of his hair.
‘Ya.’ Dennis breathed wetly, preparing for the struggle to form the next words. ‘I dad ant like. Mel Ba Barn. It waz. It. It waz too big-ah!’